Talk to The Times

Answers to Readers’ Questions About State’s Secrets

Published: November 29, 2010

The New York Times is publishing State’s Secrets, a series of articles about a trove of more than 250,000 American diplomatic cables that were originally obtained by WikiLeaks, an organization devoted to exposing official secrets. The cables reveal the daily traffic between the State Department and more than 270 diplomatic outposts around the world and offer a secret chronicle of the United States’ relations with other nations in an age of war and terrorism.

Multimedia

In addition to a nine-day series of articles on the trove of documents, The Times plans to publish on its Web site the text of about 100 of the cables — some edited and some in full — that illuminate aspects of United States foreign policy.

Editors and reporters of The Times are answering questions from readers about the series this week. Questions may be submitted by e-mail to askthetimes@nytimes.com, and if selected, may be edited for length and clarity. To read the most recent answer, click here.

What Right Do You Have?

Q.It is not up to WikiLeaks, The New York Times, or any other entity to determine whether confidential United States government information should be shielded from the public. We elect leaders who, along with their trusted appointees and officials, analyze data and make such decisions. By subverting that process, The New York Times and WikiLeaks are undermining our entire electoral process.

Resorting to “somebody will do it anyway” rationalizations is pathetic.

Legal? Perhaps. Wrong? Definitely.

— Brian Chrisman

Q. I’m writing regarding your decision to publish WikiLeaks documents, and my disappointment in your decision. Whereas, I acknowledge that you attempted to provide some censorship to the release of classified information. And I appreciate your gesture in forwarding documents to the Obama Administration for review. However, at the end of the day, I say, “How dare you?” How dare you decide what’s okay for release in this circumstance and what’s not!

I respect the First Amendment and believe in its importance. But does it mean that a line can never be drawn, even at the risk of national security? And, what makes The New York Times the most qualified to make this decision? I work in the field that you have just aided at putting at risk, and trust me when I say that you are not aware or understand the nuances of the information in these reports as well as you think you do. Even if you found a report or cable that appeared benign to you or simply political, you really aren’t aware of the secondary or tertiary affects that your release of these documents may have. Of course you will not listen to me, because The New York Times, along with WikiLeaks, obviously perceived yourselves to know better than the President of the United States, his National Security Advisors, and the United States military leaders of the war. Well, thank you for putting those of us who attempt to protect our country and your backsides in danger.

I’m sure at the end of the day, you felt compelled to release something because other news agencies were releasing information. Hopefully, you feel proud of partnering with WikiLeaks, as I have now lost a lot of respect for the editors and decision makers of The New York Times.

— F. Jean Ware

Q. I am greatly saddened by your role in this issue, and I disagree with your attempts to cloak your pursuit of readers in the context of some sort “right to know.” The fact is that these are secret documents of the United States Government, which by extension therefore are secret documents of the people of the United States. For the government to function, the simple reality, just as is undoubtedly the case in your organization, is that in order to candidly assess the situation, some items are not for public consumption. To say “it would be presumptuous to conclude that Americans have no right to know what is being done in their name” is a ridiculous statement. Are you really saying that the government should make public all its information at every level? There are reasons why there is secrecy. Should we have told Hitler when and where D-Day was coming so that the “people have a right to know”? Farce, plain and simple.

Moreover, in this case, the release of these documents means that people will die. It is as simple as that. I cannot say how many, but the butcher’s bill from this sorry “disclosure” will have to be met. Personally, I consider this willful release of secret documents to be treason.

I am not a Tea Party fanatic, nor even a Republican. I am proud to be a Democrat and have enjoyed your publication for many years both online and in print. I fear that this relationship will now have to end. I expected better.

— David Stier

A. Quite a few readers are uncomfortable with the idea that a group of editors — unelected editors — can decide to reveal information that the government wants kept secret. Sometimes we’re uncomfortable with that, too. We have as much stake in the war against terror as anyone. Our reporters travel in dangerous places to report on these subjects, and we have had members of the Times family injured, kidnapped and killed in pursuit of the news. So the thought that something we report might increase the dangers faced by the country is daunting and humbling — and not just a matter of theory for us. When we find ourselves in possession of government secrets, we think long and hard about whether to disclose them. Invariably that consideration includes extensive and serious discussions with the government, as it did with the diplomatic cables.

Pause for a second to consider exactly what The Times has done in this case. We have written a series of articles based on what we have learned about various aspects of American foreign policy from this trove of secret cables. We have drawn on our past reporting and the experience of our correspondents to supply context and to cast doubt where information in the cables is questionable. We have also chosen a small selection of the cables — about 100 in all, out of a quarter of a million documents — that we think provide useful source material for the articles we have written. We have edited out any information that could identify confidential sources — including informants, dissidents, academics and human rights activists — or otherwise compromise national security. We did this in consultation with the State Department, and while they strongly disapprove of the publication of classified material at any time, and while we did not agree with all of their requests for omission, we took their views very seriously indeed.

So, two basic questions. Why do we get to decide? And why did we decide to publish these articles and selected cables?

We get to decide because America is cursed with a free press. I’m the first to admit that news organizations, including this one, sometimes get things wrong. We can be overly credulous (as in some of the reporting about Iraq’s purported Weapons of Mass Destruction) or overly cynical about official claims and motives. We may err on the side of keeping secrets (President Kennedy wished, after the fact, that The Times had published what it knew about the planned Bay of Pigs invasion) or on the side of exposing them. We make the best judgments we can. When we get things wrong, we try to correct the record. A free press in a democracy can be messy.

But the alternative is to give the government a veto over what its citizens are allowed to know. Anyone who has worked in countries where the news diet is controlled by the government can sympathize with Thomas Jefferson’s oft-quoted remark that he would rather have newspapers without government than government without newspapers. And Jefferson had plenty of quarrels with the press of his day.

As for why we directed our journalistic attention to these cables, we hope that will be clear from the articles we have written. They contribute to our understanding of how American foreign policy is made, how well it is working, what kind of relationships we have with allies and adversaries. The first day’s articles offered the richest account we have yet seen of America’s attempts to muster a regional and global alliance against Iran; and disclosed that the State Department has increasingly put its diplomats in the uncomfortable position of gathering intelligence on diplomatic counterparts. There is much more to come. We sincerely believe that readers who take an interest in America’s conduct in the world will find this material illuminating. — Bill Keller, executive editor

Losing Foreign Cooperation?

Q. You note that “Government officials sometimes argue — and the administration has argued in the case of these secret cables — that disclosures of confidential conversations between American diplomats and their foreign counterparts could endanger the national interest by making foreign governments more wary of cooperating with the United States in the fight against terrorists or other vital activities.” But you offer no serious response to this very serious argument. Do you believe that the government argument is invalid for some reason, or do you choose to ignore it in order to accomplish other goods? This, I think, was the most glaring omission in your note to readers regarding the latest Wikileak trove.

— Glenn Willis, Boston College

A. It’s a good question that does not lend itself to a glib answer. So I hope you’ll bear with a long one.

First of all, a lot of what appears in a free press — not just secret cables — can be injurious to America’s diplomacy. To pick a recent example, news organizations have regularly quoted senior American officials (sometimes by name, but often without authorization) accusing President Karzai’s government in Afghanistan of corruption and incompetence. The fact that American officials share these views with the press is undoubtedly irritating to President Karzai, and may make him harder to deal with. And yet our relationship with President Karzai and his government is at the heart of American strategy in Afghanistan. The public that sends the money and manpower to pursue that strategy is entitled to know the nature of our allies, even if that complicates the work of diplomats.

Second, while it is enlightening to see these observations in official cables, for the most part they enlarge rather than upend our understanding of complex foreign relations. For example, The Times has reported on numerous occasions that Iran’s Arab neighbors share America’s (and Israel’s) worry about the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran. The cables dramatize the depth of their concern, but the fact of their concern is not revelatory.

Third, foreign leaders generally cooperate with the United States — or withhold their cooperation — based on self-interest. Some of the leaders quoted in the articles that we have written based on these secret cables will surely be (or at least will act) horrified that the United States did not do a better job of protecting their private conversations from public scrutiny. But they see advantages in cooperating with the United States that transcend embarrassment. They need our aid, they want our business, they want our solidarity against common enemies. So while we don’t want to dismiss the possible harm to American diplomacy, we should not exaggerate it, either.

Finally, the government is not an infallible judge of what is in the national interest. This country has a long history of information being stamped “secret” in order to hide malfeasance, or cover up embarrassing misjudgments, or paper over policy disputes. We listen to the government’s case for secrecy with great respect, but we do not always agree. — Bill Keller

Are the Documents Genuine?

Q.The New York Times coverage today about the WikiLeaks diplomatic documents is sadly lacking an explanation as to why The Times considers them trustworthy. Without some proof that they are all authentic, at the very least The Times should say — in the very first paragraph — that they could be counterfeit or otherwise changed to deliberately disadvantage the United States’s international goals. Not doing so is an editorial failure.

— Herb Zydney, New York City

A. The contents of the cables are consistent with much other reporting we have done on America’s foreign relations, and the format is familiar from embassy cables we have seen from other sources. But the most reliable authentication is this: In our extensive conversations with the United States government — in this case, and in the two previous releases of classified documents by WikiLeaks — no official has questioned the genuineness of the material, or suggested that they have been manipulated in any way. — Bill Keller

The Times and WikiLeaks

Q. CNN reported that it did not have advance access to the documents because it “declined to sign a confidentiality agreement with WikiLeaks.” Since The New York Times seems to have advance access, what were the conditions for getting access? Did The Times have to agree to anything?

— Chuck Gasperi, San Francisco

Q.Your decision to become a “media partner” of WikiLeaks is disgusting. Transparency, like everything else, is not an absolute good, and governments have both a right and a responsibility to conduct internal discussions about sensitive subjects free from the prying eyes of thieves and their media partners.

— Jerry Harkins

I do understand your decision to selectively publish the recent WikiLeaks documents, seeing as you are in fact a conscientious news organization, but I don’t think you should exclude WikiLeaks from the burden of transparency. WikiLeaks is an outfit that cries for freedom of information, yet insists that its contributors remain anonymous — a simple and silly contradiction. If Julian Assange were to join the party he has started, shouldn’t he be called on to disclose a list of names of site contributors over the years? And shouldn’t he be more forthcoming about his present whereabouts?

No, he cites a concern for “safety,” but only when it applies to him (not Americans). I think that, following from the fact that you are a conscientious news organization, you should take Assange to task. He really is nothing more that a narcissist posing as a moralist, and a man whose neurotic tendencies have, sadly, probably come about through long periods of personal suffering — a man whose own deep victimization has now led to the victimization of incredible numbers of innocent people.

So I ask you to please, bring some real, rational scrutiny to Assange and Wikileaks. Demand the same transparency that he demands of us. And expose his neurotic pronouncements as being what they are — and not some abstract call for moral justice.

Thanks and regards,

— Kevin Mercey, Chicago, IL

A. WikiLeaks is not a “media partner” of The Times. We signed no agreement of any kind, with WikiLeaks or anyone else. In fact, in this case — our third round of articles based on documents obtained by WikiLeaks — we did not receive the documents from WikiLeaks. Julian Assange, the founder of the group, decided to withhold the material from us, apparently because he was offended by our reporting on his legal and organizational problems. The London newspaper, The Guardian, gave us a copy of the archive, because they considered it a continuation of our collaboration on earlier WikiLeaks disclosures. (The Guardian initially asked us not to reveal that they were our source, but the paper’s editor said on Sunday night that he was no longer concerned about anonymity.)

We coordinated with the other news organizations on the timing of the release, but not the contents of our articles. We agreed to publish our articles over a number of days rather than in one great heave. The dipomatic cables cover a far wider array of subjects than the earlier disclosures of documents from the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq. This gradual release allows us — and our readers — to absorb the material and put it in context. It also allows more time for serious (and fruitful, in my view) discussions with the government what should be omitted from public disclosure.

WikiLeaks is a source of raw material, which we have used to write articles about America’s foreign relations. No one from WikiLeaks had any input into our articles, or was allowed to see them before publication.

Like most sources, WikiLeaks has its own motives. Our motive, in fact our reason for being, is to provide information and analysis to help readers decide what they think about the world.

As Mr. Mercey observes, WikiLeaks is also a story. We have written extensively about the organization, its legal and organizational difficulties and the official reaction to its activities (in this article, for example, and others). I expect that we will continue to report on the subject.

We agree wholeheartedly that transparency is not an absolute good. Freedom of the press includes freedom not to publish, and that is a freedom we exercise with some regularity. That is why we have withheld from publication a good deal of information in these cables that, on our own and in consultation with government officials, we believed could put lives at risk or could harm the national interest.

And while we have no control over what WikiLeaks will do, we did communicate to WikiLeaks and to the other news organizations in possession of this material both the State Department’s concerns about specific disclosures and our own plans to edit out sensitive material. The other news organizations supported these redactions. WikiLeaks has indicated that it intends to do likewise and — as a matter of news interest — we will watch their website to see what they do.

The government, of course, has the right — under law, and as a matter of common sense — to keep some information secret. When the government fails to do so, as it did in this case owing to a security breach that has reportedly been corrected, then we have to decide what to do with the fallout. In this instance, our choices were these: to ignore the secret documents, knowing they would be widely read anyway, picked over, possibly published without removal of dangerous information, probably used to advance various agendas; or, to study them, put them in context, and publish articles based on them, along with a carefully redacted selection of actual documents. We chose the latter course. — Bill Keller

Missing Subjects?

Q. There is an issue with document headers provided by the WikiLeaks articles. These articles were selected out of a larger data set, and it is apparent that issues involving China have largely been omitted. Where are articles about the financial crisis? I am deeply disturbed that The Times did not mention this obvious omission!

— R.

A. Yes, the articles were based on a larger data set. The four articles in today’s paper are just the beginning of our series on the cables, which will continue in the days and weeks ahead. Future articles will examine in greater depth a variety of subjects, including China.

At the same time, from what we understand, WikiLeaks will also be publishing more of the cables online in the weeks ahead. Questions about their scheduling would best be put to WikiLeaks. — Andrew W. Lehren, reporter

Stolen Merchandise?

Q. I am fascinated by your self-serving, holier-than-thou attitude that allows you to justify publishing documents that your government feels should be confidential, documents that are classified as secret, and at the same time criticize WikiLeaks for stealing them. Somehow, in your opinion, it is O.K. to use stolen property, just bad to steal it? If our government had even a tiny piece of a backbone, it would have stopped publication of these documents months ago, and arrested every single employee of WikiLeaks and charged them with treason. And if The New York Times publishes anything classified as secret or confidential, the same should happen to your company and every individual involved in the decision and the implementation.

I know that other papers may publish the information, but does that justify the practice? If so, then The New York Times must also feel that is is wrong for a burglar to steal something, but if known stolen goods are made available for purchase, it is perfectly right to buy them and even resell them them for a profit with no penalty or moral judgement made against anyone but the burglar? Great lesson for the youth of America.

— DeLoyd Huenink

Q. How can you ethically publish something that has been stolen? How can you potentially jeopardize lives? You do not know, nor do you have every document related to the ones you have. How could I have expected a newspaper to be ethical? They aren’t.

— Peggy Ivie

A. The WikiLeaks case is not the first time that important news reports have been based on stolen documents. In the famous case of the Pentagon Papers, The Times published articles based on a voluminous secret history of the Vietnam War, which had been stolen and copied by a former government employee, Daniel Ellsberg, who then shared the material with The Times. Then, as now, there was a public argument about whether it was right for The Times to publish articles based on those stolen documents, which were more sensitive — classifed “top secret” — than the WikiLeaks cables.

President Nixon claimed that the articles compromised national security and strained relations with our allies. But one year later, one of the administration’s top lawyers, who had made such arguments, admitted that no programs or diplomatic relationships had really been hurt by publication of the Pentagon Papers. Then, as now, The Times made the difficult editorial judgment that the newsworthiness of the documents demanded publication.

These are not easy decisions, but they are made in the interest of keeping the citizenry well informed about its government. That is what the founders of this country intended. It is often easy to overlook how fearful of centralized government power they were, and how much they trusted a free press to be a bulwark against it. — Jill Abramson, managing editor

Where Is This Stuff Coming From?

Q. I am reading you online today, and nowhere can I find a story explaining just how the leaks came to be. Is there a mole inside the government who has cracked into the computers? Or someone on the outside who has broken in? Can you publish a detailed explanation how these and other leaks are being engineered? Are spies to blame, or any-government insiders, or what?

My sense is that no one will be able to trust anything sent over the Internet from now on — not government e-messages, private or business e-mails, e-commerce, e-banking, e-investing, the works. And that is downright frightening.

— Dick Hubert, Rye Brook, N.Y.

A. We have no first-hand, or even second-hand, knowledge of where WikiLeaks obtained the embassy cables, but the United States has arrested a low-ranking Army intelligence analyst on suspicion of being the source. Here are two articles about him, one published in June and another in August. He allegedly boasted of downloading the stuff onto CDs that he disguised with Lady Gaga labels. You may or may not be justified in worrying about the security of the Internet, but apparently the leak of the diplomatic cables should not contribute to your anxiety. — Bill Keller

Time Frame of Cables?

Q.What is the time span of these documents? Are they only from the Obama administration or do they also cover the Bush II administration? Thanks!

— Mike Berke

A. There are more than 250,000 cables, and these span from 1966 through February 2010. But the vast majority are in the last five years. More than half of the cables are during President Bush’s second term. About one in four cables were filed since President Obama took office, though obviously those dealing with the most current events are during his time in office. — Andrew W. Lehren

Comparison With Pentagon Papers

Q.Can you describe similarities and differences between your disclosure of this year’s WikiLeaks cables and your printing of the Pentagon Papers in 1971? Thank you.

— Stephen Santangelo, South Plainfield, N.J.

A. The most striking difference is technological.

Back in 1971, when Daniel Ellsberg fought to shine a public light on the Pentagon Papers, he did not have the capacity to publish the material himself. If he could have, as WikiLeaks could have, he would have posted the Pentagon Papers in a public place like the Internet, which didn’t yet exist. While WikiLeaks supplied the diplomatic cables to certain members of the news media, it could have published the cables by itself and intended to make the material public no matter what.

Ellsberg had first turned to the U.S. Senate before he approached The Times, hoping it would hold hearings on the government deceptions revealed in the Pentagon Papers. The Senate would not touch the “top secret” material. So Mr. Ellsberg turned to Neil Sheehan, a reporter in the Times’s Washington bureau. There, Sheehan’s boss, the Washington Bureau chief Max Frankel, deemed the material extremely newsworthy and worthy of publication.In June, after months of sifting through the papers, The Times published its articles about them, which caused a sensation.

A major similarity is the care with which editors at the Times approached the sensitive material, as true in 2010 as it was in 1971. Editors and reporters in both cases spent months poring over documents, sifting through the material and isolating the most important matters for publication. In the case of the diplomatic cables, the Times contacted the government to hear its objections to publication in the days before publication. In 1971, this was not the case, because the Times feared it could be prevented by the government from publishing. In both cases, Times editors carefully weighed what was responsible and important to publish and what was not. The public’s right to know urgent, compelling news about its government’s activities guided editorial judgment in both cases.

In 1971, Times editors worried that the government might force the newspaper to cease publication, and the Nixon Administration did, unsuccessfully, argue before the U.S. Supreme Court to prevent publication of the Pentagon Papers. The Court ruled that there could be no prior restraint on the U.S. news media, a landmark event in First Amendment law. — Jill Abramson

Were You Surprised By the Cables?

Q. Given that your newspaper covers extensively the topics discussed in the leaks, did the content of the cables shock you or change your perception of the American diplomacy of recent years? Is the real news the content of the cables, or the leak?

— Connie Qian

A. You ask an important question. There are indeed things we learned from these cables. To list a few: the revelation that American diplomats are now being asked to collect even the credit-card and frequent-flier numbers of foreign dignitaries, blurring the line between diplomacy and spying; the news that North Korea supplied advanced missiles to Iran; the realization that the United States believes the Chinese government hacked into Google (we suspected that the Chinese had, but it remains unproven); the fact that China, North Korea’s only great-power ally, knows so little about what goes on inside North Korea. You will read more about such surprises in coming days.

It’s true, though, that there is little in the cables that fundamentally changes our understanding of the most important problems confronting the United States. We knew, and have published, the broad outlines of many of the issues covered in the cables. That is one reason we believed that publishing the cables themselves would not harm national security. But what makes the contents of the cables so fascinating — and newsworthy — is the level of detail.

The cables give us a deeper understanding of how the United States conducts diplomacy, and a clearer portrait of its allies and enemies. To read the story of how the United States carefully assembled a coalition for harsher sanctions against Iran is to watch diplomacy in action through a lens we seldom see — cajoling here, reassuring there, horsetrading all the way to the end. We can track the mixture of pressure and incentives that prodded countries to accept detainees from Guantánamo Bay, allowing insights into the barriers that remain to the closing of a prison that has become a lightning rod. When we read the unvarnished portraits of foreign leaders, we gain invaluable knowledge of the motives, behavior, and flaws of American partners and enemies — ones that will help citizens judge for themselves the wisdom of American policy.— Susan Chira, foreign editor